Legion

Trailer for version 1.2 of TRI-TRI-TRIOBELISK, out now on the App Store!

Alternate Realities

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Men With Hats

Announcing: TRI-TRI-TRIOBELISK

My latest collaborative project TRI-TRI-TRIOBELISK is out on the App Store today! It’s is a faster and more extreme remix version of my previous creation Shot Shot Shoot. The new game features tons of music and art by the super-talented electronic music artist Triobelisk and you can get it here for the special launch price of $1!

But first, let’s look at the trailer:

Hope you like the game!

Take care,
Erik

Escaping the ice

If that boat keeps going forward it will end up in America!

Tomorrow I’ll go to San Francisco to attend the Game Developer’s Conference. My game Shot Shot Shoot is nominated for the “Best Mobile Game” award at IGF, you can read all about it here if you like. I hope it will be a fun trip!

It’s party time!

My favorite game magazine together with my favorite game collective are arranging what will probably be my favorite party of the year. Info and tickets here!

To Stop You Must Die

My friend and partner in crime Niklas Åkerblad just released an album on the underground label Swedish Columbia. All the music from ‘Kometen’ are in there together with ten other awesome songs (you can listen to them in the player below). Get it on iTunes or Amazon!

Holiday sale!!!

My three games are on sale for the rest of December:

Bluberry Garden ($1)
Kometen ($1)
Shot Shot Shoot ($1)

Thanks for a truly fantastic year everybody !

Hugs,
Erik

Nordic Game Program gives us a grant!

Me and Nicke at the ceremony dinner yesterday

A couple of months ago Niklas Åkerblad (the artist who I made ‘Kometen‘ together with) and I applied for a grant to make a new game together. The wait has felt long but now it’s official – we got the money!!! Needless to say we are both totally psyched for getting this great opportunity and we really feel it’s going to be something special. We will soon release some information about the game, but until then I’ll just say that it’s a very ambitious and exciting idea that I’ve wanted to make ever since I released ‘Blueberry Garden’.

Finally I want to thank the Nordic Game Program for their work and that they exist and that they believe in us! THANKS!!!

Erik

Mansedanse PLAY!

Hi everyone,

I just came home from a great little trip to Tampere, Finland. Some cool people there arranged a festival called MANSEDANSE and as part of this Petri Purho and I were invited to talk about our games and indie games in general. Here are some blurry pictures that I took with my phone during the stay…

There were a lot of old, beautiful factory buildings in Tampere

Announcing: Shot Shot Shoot

Hi everybody,

I was one of the people who got quite excited when Apple announced their iPad back in January. Not because I wanted yet another gadget to let me surf the internet or read e-books in bed or whatever. No — what I was excited about was the possibilities of playing games together on a computer that is placed face up in the middle of the table. I’ve always loved playing board games and luckily I have a big family who’s also way into that. There is something about the tension of sitting face to face with your opponent that really excites me, maybe it’s because that’s how games have been enjoyed for thousands of years (anyone who’s ever played a game of Chess or Go knows what I’m talking about). The possibilities for games that take this kind of ancient setup and adds the special powers of a computer is really intriguing to me.

The moment I got hold of my iPad I started working on a small game for two players. I called it “Shot Shot Shoot” because it explains the gameplay pretty well. It’s fast, to the point and highly competitive. I built the game in my spare time during the Kometen project and every Friday for a couple of months I brought it to a bar in New York where a bunch of game developers go for beer.

One of the developers was Frank Lantz from area/code (he’s the guy on the right) and he seemed to really like the game. Motivated by his enthusiasm, and all the other positive feedback from people I have showed the game to, I have spent the summer here in Sweden polishing it, adding computer AI opponents and composing music.

And so… a couple of weeks ago the first world Shot Shot Shoot championship was arranged! Here’s how it looked in all it’s indie celebrity glory:

The game is live now on the App Store, get it there for only $1 during a limited time.

And here‘s the official page with more information, etc.

Shot Shot Shoot Explained

Kometen update is out with iPad support and tons of new content!

Hi!

It’s a great pleasure to finally reveal the update for Kometen. Me and Nicke have worked hard on this for two months, adding lots of things and tweaking what was already there. Here’s the changes:

• iPad support through universal binary. You just have to see this in motion :)
• Different regions to explore with new and unique music, backgrounds and objects
• Improved controls (quicker and smoother maneuvering of your comet)
• More food, debris and other fantastic things to see on your journey (including five objects from the drawing competition, more info below)
• Killing your comet now requires confirmation (tap five times in the upper left corner on the comet stats screen)
• Various small bug fixes and improvements

So what are you waiting for, go get the update! And if you don’t own the game yet — buy it here.

Winners of the Debris Drawing Competition

A while back we had a drawing competition where we let anyone who wanted submit drawings with ideas for debris to be added in the game. We selected five winners and — drum roll — here they are:

By Ted Martens (click the image to see the awesome animation)

By Calegaster

By Inlagd Sill

By Rowan Tedge (things went out of control with this one!)

By Houille (this concept was too fun not to be done)

Congratulations to all the winners, very good job! And thanks to everyone who participated, there was a lot of great stuff :) Nicke has used these drawings as reference images for five new objects in the game (we also added some touches of our own). Get the update to see how they look!

Northern Lights Indie Pack

Get five great indie games (including Blueberry Garden) for 60% off!

A quick status update for Kometen

Hi!

It’s summer here in Sweden now and when Niklas and I are not sitting at the top of mountains thinking about life, we are working hard on completing the update for Kometen. We are keeping the game very much true to the original experience while trying to make it a lot more varied and surprising… we are very excited to see what you all will think about it!

Oh and by the way; winners in the drawing competition has been decided but will not be revealed until the update goes live. Thanks again to everyone who participated! And of course to everyone who has bought the game!!!

Take care,
Erik

Kometen iPhone backgrounds

More backgrounds await those who make it to the end of the universe.

Kometen competition!

Thanks to everyone who has bought Kometen so far, it’s really awesome to see that so many people are playing and enjoying it!

We’re currently working on the first update of the game and to spice things up a little we are going to have a competition. To participate you have to draw (or scribble) an object that you think would be interesting for a comet to find while traveling through space. Send the image file (scan it in first if you drew on a paper) to niklas [at] grafikbyran.com

The five objects we like the most will be translated into watercolor space debris by Nicke and put into the next version of the game. The original drawings will also be put up here on the site for display (with the name of their creators of course). We might do something with the other submissions too, but first we have to see how many people want to participate.

Deadline for the competition is Wednesday, May 26th.

So don’t be shy, take the chance to get your idea into Kometen! Post any questions in the comments below.

Take care,
Erik & Nicke

PS. We do this just as a fun thing so please don’t try to sue us for stealing your idea or anything. Peace!

Kometen is out!

Get it on iTunes!

Official Page

Hope you like it!!!

Erik

Announcing “Kometen”

A while ago my friend Niklas Åkerblad (“Nicke” for short) and I decided to do a little game project together, kinda just for fun (and to see how well we could work together). We decided to work with the iPhone and iPod Touch since it seemed neat and a good fit for our small idea. Of course it still took way longer than we thought to get it done — game development never fails to surprise you… Anyway, it’s been a really nice experience to work together and now we’re finally starting to wrap things up. Exactly when the game will be out is hard to say since Apple has to approve it for the App Store but it shouldn’t take too long. Until then, here’s a little trailer:

The art (which is all watercolor) and music is made by Niklas while I have been doing the programming and game design. The overall concept is something we’ve worked very much together on though. In short the game is about exploring space to find art, while at the same time learning how to fly around in a graceful way. There isn’t any scoring system or way to lose, instead it’s all about self improvement and judging your own performance. I hope you will find it as much fun as we do!

Article is up: “Creating Blueberry Garden”

Finally I have finished writing my article about the making of Blueberry Garden. It’s not a classic post-mortem since it primarily discusses my thoughts on the design while leaving out production details. Hopefully it can give some insight to what I wanted to achieve with the game regarding interactive storytelling and where I think I succeeded respectively failed.

Read it now on Gamasutra

Thanks to Christian Nutt for the support and making me finish the text!

Årets svenska talang!

Just got the news that I won the prize for “Swedish talent of the year”, given out by the Swedish games industry organization Dataspelsbranschen. Thank you guys!

A quick status update

Hello dear blog readers! Hope you’re doing fine, here is some news from me:

This week I arrived in San Francisco which is a very nice change from cold Sweden. On Tuesday the Game Developer’s Conference starts, I’m sure it’s going to be awesome. After the conference is over I will stay for a while in the US with my girlfriend — very exciting!

Today I decided to finally open a proper Twitter account, so here you have it: twitter.com/e_svedang

Regarding my games I can say that I have several projects coming along nicely, one that is nearly finished. A trailer is on its way so I will keep my mouth shut about what it is just a little bit longer.

Take care,

Erik

Nordic Game Jam 2010

Blueberry Garden in museums

A.L.I.C.E museum

Mediateca Expandida. Arcadia

Best of IGF 2009

Bob Came in Pieces

Some very good friends are releasing their latest creation on Steam today! It’s a really fun little game where you fly around with a space ship and solve physics-based puzzles. You also find spare parts that you must use to modify your ship so that it can handle different situations. Get it here now!

2009 is over

Water color painting by Niklas Åkerblad (more about him in a bit).

Hi! I just wanna thanks everyone who has made this year so awesome. So many fantastic friends (new and old), so many great experiences — I feel extremely lucky.

Next year will be no less exciting, I have a lot of projects coming up.

Happy New Decade!!!

Erik

Finally! Blueberry Garden 1.1

At last I have finished the first patch of the game. It shouldn’t have taken this long and I’m terribly sorry for that… I could give you a bad excuse or two but instead I will present what the improvements are:

• Blueberry Playground — Brand new play mode where you can place fruits and creatures into the game world and see how they interact. Easy to use interface and a custom made level for your scientific pleasure!
• Slightly redesigned level design — A more perfected experience that will work better for new players.
• Museum Mode — This can be turned on only from the settings.xml file in the content folder. When on it disables the option menu and exit command. The game also restarts automatically if left unattended, perfect for exhibition environments!
• Alternative key for teleportation — You can now use ‘H’ if your computer lacks a Home-key.
• Added support for some more screen resolutions from the option menu — If you still need another one, tell me (or change the settings.xml file).
• You can now use the mouse to navigate the menus
• Improved stability — I hope that this version will remove quite a bit of the crash issues that some people have experienced

If you still feel a bit reluctant to buy the game, here’s a demo version you can try first (Steam not required).

Huge thanks again to everyone who has supported me!!!

Erik

BAF!

Last week I went to Bradford, England to speak at the 16th Bradford Animation Festival. It was a really great experience in a lot of ways so I decided to create a little photo reportage about what happened.

Göteborg

I live here now.

Digital Poetry?

Hi! I’ve been messing around with something called Processing for quite a while now and I like it so much that I felt the urge to write about it here. In case you haven’t heard about it, Processing is meant to be an easy but powerful programming environment for creating images, animation, and interactions. It’s open source and used by a lot of artists, teachers, designers, etc to make interesting and beautiful stuff. One of the best things with the whole thing is that you can upload the programs you make to a website called Open Processing. That site works as a gallery for programs and it’s really fun to see what people are able to come up with when they are liberated from most of the hardships of coding and just can focus on the fun parts (getting things to move and interact on the screen).

I have actually uploaded eight small things that I’ve made myself to my profile on Open Processing, go check it out if you want to! They aren’t games or anything, just doodles made out of code or whatever. Maybe you will like them.

Finally I want to apologize for not releasing a patch for Blueberry Garden yet. It’s on it’s way, I’m just slow (for a lot of reasons). I hope to get it out soon though so that I can start working on my new ideas!

Best wishes,

Erik

Talking at Assembly

Hi,

Last Friday I went to Assembly in Helsinki to give a seminar. The title of my talk was “Creating Blueberry Garden – how to get away with bad design choices (sort of)”. It went pretty ok and some nice people in the audience even wanted to get me as a speaker at their uni :)

Apart from giving the talk I mainly spent my time with Petri Purho and Cactus (who both were giving their own lectures) in some of the nice parks in Helsinki — great times!

Take care,

Erik

Indie Games Sale!

Great tip for everyone interested in indie games (and everyone else). This weekend Steam is having a huge  bundled sale and Blueberry Garden is included. Read more about it here! 75% off!!!

UPDATE: The sale has ended, big thanks to everyone who bought the bundle!

Exquisite Corpses

(click image for bigger view)

On Blueberry Garden’s Music, by Daduk

My Yamaha P80

Hello !

What an amazing destiny for these couple of piano tracks I published on the Internet a couple of years ago ! I was miles away from imagining that one day, they would be selected as the soundtrack of such a beautiful video game.

I hope you will enjoy listening to the music as much as I liked to compose it, and that it will add a little something to your journey through the garden.

I am sincerely grateful to Erik for bringing me into the Blueberry Garden adventure, from the release of the trailer to the San Francisco prize ceremony and now, for giving me this opportunity to blog about Blueberry Garden’s soundtrack, “Et Apres”.

Finally, I read many nice comments you left about the music: thank you so much for this ! I might one day publish the scores, but I am unfortunately not really good at writing them… I hope to tell a bit more about the stories behind the tracks in a future post.

You can find the album here http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/daduk.

Daduk

Regarding the Demo

Hi folks, just wanted to clarify something about the demo version of Blueberry Garden.

The main purpose of the demo is for you to make sure you can run the game and to see if you like the mood etc. There is no goal or ending to demo so if you like what you see, please buy the full version. You’ll only ruin the experience if you play the demo too much I think.

Also — HUGE thanks to everyone who has bought the game and especially those who have commented on it here on my site afterwards! It’s awesome to know what you think and that so many people seem to get something out of playing it.

Best wishes,

Erik

“Bloodline Champions” wins Swedish Game Awards

I’m at the annual Swedish Game Awards in Stockholm right now and (as I was hoping) the very cool game Bloodline Champions won the Grand Prize!

The game was made by a group of students from my university and I know things will go very well for the in the future because they are awesome. Good luck guys!

Game is out!

Ok, finally Blueberry Garden is up on Steam!!! =) =) =)

What a great and exciting journey it has been, thanks everybody for all the support and patience!

The only thing left now is for you to play the game — Get it here

Also, here is the new Official Blueberry Garden information page.

Take care,

Erik

Sooooooorrry

Seems like there are some problems with the Steam release stuff, will probably take a little while to sort it out. I hope you have some patience with this, it’s the first time I’m doing this kind of thing you know. I’m terribly sorry and I will do all I can to get the game out as soon as possible!

Erik

Party

Ok, so the game is supposed to be released very soon and to celebrate I decided to have a little party, chilling out in my apartment with some friends. I’ll update this post with pics of what’s happening as the evening progresses.

Blueberry pies!

Blueberry Garden Release Date

On Steam!

How soon is now?

Really soon.

But not today.

I’m sorry and I hope you won’t hate me.

Official press release will be reliable though.

Oh, and I’m so happy people want to play the game, I really hope you will like it…

Take care,

Erik

Ilinx

Nordic Game Conference + 2009 Official Swedish Indie Mystery Tour roundup

Suda talking about his games.

Highlights of the week:

– Petri Purho and Kyle Gabler’s lecture, which was easily the best of those I heard (and everyone else thought so too I believe). Great job!

– Staying at Martin’s (Prototyprally) and Jens’ (Oxeye Games) places — thanks a lot dudes!!!

– Going by car with Martin, Petri and Kyle to Gothenburg  visiting Cactus… too bad I was super sleepy the whole trip :(

– All the rest of the nice people I met at the conference and during the parties!

Nordic Game Conference

Just wanted to say that I’m going to be at the Nordic Game Conference this week. Hope to meet some of you there!

Erik

Interviews!

Hey!

A lot of people have interviewed me lately and I thought maybe you want to read some of it:

“Of Blueberries and Gardening” by The Escapist

“Flying high in Blueberry Garden” by Tuna Snax

“Greenfingers: An Interview with Erik Svedäng” by The Reticule

“Ten Questions with Erik Svedäng” by Game and Player

“Interview: Erik Svedäng” by Act of Rage!

(I left out the ones in foreign languages and also forgot where to find some texts, please tell me if you have written something and want it linked.)

Thanks to all the interviewers!

Erik

I won

Seumas McNally Grand Prize 2009

It’s kind of crazy, thanks to everyone!

For those who wonder — the game is not out yet but I will release it for PC pretty soon, hopefully.

Take care,

Erik

San Francisco!

Fjord

A view from my parents’ house.

Spelgalan 2009

Spelgalan 2009 is a party and a price ceremony for the Swedish games industry. Big congrats to Frictional Games for winning the indie category!

The last picture is dedicated to Boel.

Potatisochpurjolökssoppa